Itamar Killers Caught

Good news, I guess: the two Palestinian terrorists who murdered five members of the Fogel family in Itamar have been caught:

The suspects have confessed to the stabbings and re-enacted the murders, security forces said on Sunday. According to Army Radio, they did not express remorse for their crimes.

Remorse? Are you kidding? The Palestinian authorities presumably will erect monuments to them and produce television shows honoring their achievement, as they have done in the past.

Both men are affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PLFP) terror group and received significant assistance from family members and friends after the attack, security forces added.

No surprise there.

The suspects planned the stabbings days ahead of time. On the night of March 11, after unsuccessful attempts to obtain firearms from a local PFLP representative in their village, the two set out toward Itamar on foot, armed with knives, a wirecutter and masks to cover their faces.

They tried another house first, but there was no one home, so they stole a firearm and left. Then they looked inside the Fogel home and saw sleeping children.

Immediately after entering the home, the youths set their knives on two young brothers sleeping in their beds, 4-year-old Elad and 11-year-old Yoav.
They then entered the parents’ bedroom, where they launched a knife attack on Ehud and Ruth Fogel. The parents fought back, attempting to fend off the attackers. At that point, one of the suspects shot Ruth with a stolen M-16, at which point the two died of their wounds.

The two killers then started to leave the Fogels’ house. That would have been the end of their murder spree, except that the Fogels’ three month old baby started crying, alerting the Palestinians to the fact that they had missed a victim. One of them returned to finish off the baby:

The two then left the house. One of the suspects, however, returned and stabbed to death three-month-old baby Hadas after she began crying in her crib

Actually, he decapitated her. The two Palestinians helpfully explained to the authorities that they didn’t realize there were two more children sleeping in the Fogel home; if they had known, they would have killed them, too.

After completing the slaughter, the suspects walked back to the village and told Hakim’s uncle, PFLP member Salah Adin Awad, what they had done. Salah hid their firearms and instructed them to burn their clothes, which were covered in blood.

It turns out that at least one of the “youths” who committed this atrocity has a criminal history and belongs to a family of terrorists. It is good that the murderers have been caught, but there is nothing surprising about any of this. Such atrocities would occur every day, but for the Israelis’ extraordinary security measures, such as the much-maligned check points on the West Bank and the security fence.
Via Judith Levy at Ricochet.